Brass Ring (34 page)

Waiting for the birth of her baby, she was happier than she’d been in her life. Finally, she would have something that was hers alone, someone she could love who was guaranteed to love her back and who wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave her.

She stole baby clothes and blankets and a diaper bag. Pacifiers were easy to steal, and she had a collection of different colors and designs. Her layette was rounded out through the shoplifting efforts of her friends, especially the two young men who thought they might be the father of her baby. Vanessa’s best guess at paternity, though, was a third boy who had passed briefly through Seattle on his way somewhere else.

She could only imagine herself having a girl, and she’d lie awake at night thinking of names. Anna was her favorite. An old-fashioned name that made her envision fields of wildflowers and butterflies and the safety and security that seemed a part of those images.

A girlfriend had dropped her off at the hospital entrance when her labor started. Alone and frightened and in worse pain than she’d thought a person could bear, she let the hospital staff call her father. He was there in the waiting room when Anna was born by cesarean section. Anna. Full-term, but only five and a half pounds. A pale, bony, round-eyed little baby with a dusting of pale silk on her head.

Anna had trouble breathing, they said, and they kept her in the nursery. Every chance she could, Vanessa would shuffle down the long corridor to the nursery to hold her daughter. She’d sit on a hard wooden chair and rock her, hum to her, ignoring the sideways glances the nurses would give her, the whispering that went on behind her back. The nurses didn’t like her. They wore pleased expressions on their faces when they told her it was time to go back to her room. They would have to pry Anna from her hands, though, to get her to leave.

Her friends visited her in the hospital, sneaking her beer and cigarettes, and on a couple of occasions, making so much noise that the staff threatened to kick them out.

On Vanessa’s fourth day in the hospital, a social worker from the county appeared in her room and told her she wouldn’t be able to keep Anna. “You can’t take care of her,” the social worker said. “You can’t even take care of yourself.”

At first Vanessa didn’t believe her. Could they do that, take a baby from her mother? She felt desperate. She promised to stop drinking, stop smoking. Return to school. She would change friends, move back with her father. Anything, if they wouldn’t take Anna from her. But the social worker’s decision was firm, and the nurses looked at Vanessa with a smug sense of vindication. She wondered which of them had made the call to have her baby stolen from her.

On one occasion, when she’d cursed at her night nurse and thrown her empty emesis basin at her, the nurse retorted, “You just about killed that baby when she was inside of you. Did you expect us to let you finish the job?”

Or maybe it had been her father who had arranged to have Anna taken away from her. A baby in his house certainly would have put a damper on his jet-setting lifestyle. Her indifference toward him turned to hatred.

It was many, many years before she realized they had all been right. The nurses, the social worker, her father. The situation had been poorly handled—cruelly and stupidly handled—but Anna had needed their protection from her. At the age of seventeen, Vanessa Harte would have made a dangerous mother.

Long after Anna’s birth, Vanessa studied fetal alcohol syndrome in medical school. During that time, she suffered a bout of anxiety and sleeplessness, and her hair, which had always glistened with curls and waves, began to grow in straight. She was haunted by fuzzy images of Anna as she struggled to remember her baby’s tiny features. Hadn’t Anna had the small head, the upturned nose, the elongated upper lip of an infant suffering from FAS? Or had the baby’s face changed in her memory over the years to taunt her?

The day they transferred Anna to another, unnamed, hospital was the day Vanessa first cut herself. She had accidentally broken her water glass by dropping it on the edge of her bed tray, and she stared at the jagged pieces for a long time before picking one of them up and running it, slowly and smoothly, in a long line down the length of her thigh. There was no pain. Only a fascination as she watched the invisible line bead up into a slender thread of red. She made the second and third lines thicker. Then she left the hospital without the permission of her doctor to avoid the wounds’ being discovered. And, also, because she was desperate for a drink.

For two years, she lived with friends, occasionally returning home to beg for money, which her father would reluctantly provide. She hated asking him and would only do so when she’d exhausted all other avenues for generating income, including selling drugs and herself.

On her nineteenth birthday, though, everything changed.

She was driving a boyfriend’s car when she ran a stoplight and broadsided a Volkswagen Beetle. She herself was uninjured, but through a drunken haze, she watched as a little girl—about Anna’s age—was pulled unconscious from the crumpled VW and loaded into an ambulance. Vanessa stared after the ambulance as it sped off down the street, sirens blaring. She had nearly killed a little girl like Anna. The accident sobered her in a way nothing else could.

The court ordered her into a residential alcohol treatment program, and she went willingly, her nightmares of Anna, of the carousel, mingling now with nightmares of the accident. With a new subdued determination, she endured the symptoms of withdrawal and the seductive taunting of her friends, who called or wrote or visited her in the hospital. She found strength, though, in her thoughts of the little girl. J. T. Gray.

After two weeks in the program—and with the permission of J.T.’s parents—she was given a pass to visit the child in her room at Lassiter Children’s Hospital.

She visited J.T. daily. The child was still in traction but was recovering well from her injuries, although she would always—
always
—walk with a limp. Vanessa spent hours entertaining J.T. in that hospital room and quickly fell in love with her. J.T., with her child’s ignorance of Vanessa’s role in her misfortune, fell for her young visitor even more swiftly. Ned and Sara, the girl’s parents, seemed to see in Vanessa something everyone else had missed. Her intelligence. Her compassion. Or perhaps they were the first people to see her sober and real in a very long time. They could see the good parts of her beginning to break through.

When J.T. was released from the hospital, Ned and Sara hired Vanessa to help them with her at home. They didn’t have much money, but they provided Vanessa with a room and meals and more of a family life than she’d known since before her father had taken her to Seattle. Ned took her to an AA meeting, and only then did she realize that he, too, had wrestled with the bottle. Her loneliness began to disappear. She’d spend her days with J.T. and her evenings with the entire family, reading or talking or working around the house. Sometimes she would go a week or more without a nightmare.

Sara was a teacher’s aide, and she persuaded Vanessa to take the high school equivalency exam, which she passed easily. After that, she attended community college for two years at night, taking care of J.T. during the day.

The Grays moved away then, and Vanessa was left feeling as though she’d had little angels flutter into her life, do their good work, then flutter out again when she was capable of taking care of herself. And she was indeed capable. She had new friends through school and AA, new strength in the face of alcohol, and a goal for herself. She wanted to be a doctor.

Her father seemed relieved to provide her with the necessary funds for school. Her relationship with him had softened into one of mutual tolerance, which seemed to suit them both. Len Harte had never learned how to be a good father, how to shift the focus of his existence from himself to his child. Giving Vanessa money was the best he could do, and at that point in her life, it was what she needed most.

Vanessa slowed her pace as she ran along the sidewalk next to the cemetery wall. She would have to write to J.T. and her new husband, and to Ned and Sara, to tell them that she and Brian had finally gotten married. The Grays would be thrilled for her, if a little annoyed that she hadn’t told them before the wedding. But they would understand.

She turned down an alley to take a shortcut back to the hospital. She felt a sudden yearning to get home to the life she had now. And to her husband, the man who knew everything there was to know about her and had still taken a vow never to leave.

VIENNA

JON LOOKED UP AS
Pat Wykowski wheeled into his office and dropped a manila folder on his desk.

“I was talking with Margaret Sulley this morning,” she said, “and she’s changed her mind. She wants to talk about the social aspects of rehab instead of independent living for her keynote address at the retreat.”

“What a surprise.” He smiled at Pat. Margaret would probably change her mind four or five more times before September. She was notoriously disorganized but a dynamic speaker once she’d settled on her topic. “And Tom Ferry’s going to do the skin-care seminar,” he added.

He had spoken with Tom an hour ago and had come close to asking him for advice about the burn on his foot. Tom had clearly been in a rush to get off the phone, and so Jon had swallowed his question. He’d taped a bandage over the burn that morning, barely looking at the still-red skin. If it was not healing properly, he didn’t want to know.

“So, what’s so important it couldn’t wait until this afternoon?” Pat asked.

It was ten o’clock Tuesday morning, and he’d called Pat to ask if she had time to meet with him. He would have insisted if she’d said no. He had to get this over with.

He’d told Jill, Claire’s secretary, that Claire was out sick, but now he was about to tell the truth, for the first time. How much of the truth, he wasn’t sure. Enough to give Pat a clear view of the situation, but not enough to humiliate himself.

“Could you close the door, please?” he asked.

Pat registered a flash of surprise at the request, raising her eyebrows, the dimpled smile temporarily in abeyance. She shut the door, then wheeled around to face him in her chair, hands folded in her lap.

“Claire and I have separated,” he said. The words sounded so ridiculous that he almost laughed.

Pat looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then let out a laugh herself. “This is a joke, right?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“
Jon
. You and Claire?”

“We’ve been having some problems for a while.”

“You and Claire?” she repeated. “But you two work everything out. I’ve never known another couple who could handle adversity with such…such sanity and always come out on top, every time.”

“Not this time.”

“Was it a mutual decision?”

He drew in a breath, leaning forward on his desk. “I’m practicing on you, Pat,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell people about this, so maybe you can help me figure out what to say.”

She brushed a thick strand of blond hair from her temple, revealing deep lines in her forehead. He had never seen those lines before. He wanted to erase them, and he longed to see her wacky grin. Pat Wykowski looking serious was almost too much to bear.

“What happened?” Pat rested an arm on his desk.

“I asked her to leave,” he said.

“You what? Why?”

“She’s been different lately, ever since she saw that woman jump off the bridge. It changed her.” He wouldn’t tell Pat about the flashbacks. She would ask too many questions.

Pat put on the even-featured face she reserved for those patients who did or said something she found abominable.

“But Jon,” she said carefully, “enduring that sort of trauma would change anyone. Claire probably needs you more than ever. Can’t you be patient with her? It hasn’t been that long.”

He was briefly confused before realizing that Pat thought that he was the partner pulling away. In a way, he supposed he was.

“She wanted to go.” He ran his hand over the folder she had dropped on his desk. “See, she met the brother of the woman who jumped,” he said, “and she’s gotten…attached to him. He’s helping her make sense of what happened.”

“Oh, my God.” Pat shook her head. “Is she…is this some kind of affair?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m not sure what to call it.”

Pat stiffened in her chair, a flare of anger in her eyes. “I can’t believe she would leave you for some other guy,” she said.

Oh, that sounded ugly, and he had to look away. He fingered the edge of the folder. “It wasn’t her idea. As I said, I offered her her freedom. All she did was take it.”

“But she’s so devoted to you.”

He didn’t like her choice of words. Devotion was different from love. Devotion didn’t imply a relationship between equals.

“Maybe devotion’s not the best foundation for a marriage,” he said.

Pat was quiet. She wore her shrink-in-thought expression. “You and Claire never fought, did you?” It was more of a statement than a question. Almost an accusation.

“No. There was never anything to fight about.”

“Maybe the two of you simply didn’t deal with your problems.”

“Well, you know Claire. Everything was always rosy in her eyes.”

“And you liked it that way.”

A wave of sadness filled his chest. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I did. And I miss it.”

“Oh, Jonny.” Pat wheeled her chair next to his so that she could lean over to hug him. In the warmth of her arms, he felt her love and strength and found he couldn’t easily let go of her. When she drew away, he hoped the tears in his eyes weren’t visible.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “Do you need anything?”

“I need to know how to tell everyone else.”

“Why should it all be on your shoulders?”

“Because Claire’s taking some time off. I need to offer some explanation for her absence.”

“Just tell them the truth,” she said. “You’re among friends here, Jon.”

They sat together awhile longer. He didn’t want to talk much about the separation. She had questions about Randy but quickly dropped them when she encountered his resistance to answering them. He wanted her company, though, and she seemed to sense that. They talked about skiing and a little about the retreat, and when she finally wheeled to the door, it was close to noon. She looked back at him.